Computer worm captures paedophile

This could be the answer to another form of the Net's version of the chicken-egg question, viz, which is worse, malware writers or paedophiles? Well, there's certainly no record of a paedophile catching a malware writer, but now you've got a case where a child pornography offender received a copy of a worm-generated email and turned himself in.

A child porn offender in Germany turned himself in to the police after mistaking an email he received from a computer worm for an official warning that he was under investigation, authorities said on Tuesday.

The 20-year-old was caught out by a version of the "Sober" worm, a prolific Internet virus which can invade computers and then send out messages from a host of fabricated addresses.

The trap was set when the man got an email saying "an investigation is underway", that listed the sender as Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA). Police charged him after finding pornographic images of children on his home computer.

Perhaps there has been a similar case in the US, given that George Bush is admitting that there have been secret wiretaps on US citizens, and that this worm has been around for a while. But perhaps the US's police have also more wisely decided to keep quiet about those..

"It just goes to show that computer worms aren't always destructive," said a spokesman for police in the western city of Paderborn. "Here it helped us to uncover a crime which would otherwise probably have gone undetected."

We just hope he's not trying to encourage worm writers with those words.